I note with sorrow the passing of a permanent legend of the chess world.

Bobby Fischer long ago stopped competing openly, though there were lots of rumors that an anonymous player of tremendous strength was beating GMs on the internet. His last officially sanctioned game was in 1972, when he played Boris Spassky for the world championship. His brilliance and eccentricity are both well chronicled, so I’ll only relate a few of my favorite anecdotes.

Everyone knows he learned to play when he was 6, and dropped out before graduating from high school because he was already a professional chessplayer. In fact he won the US championship, handily, when he was 14. Such talent cannot fail to warp the way a child learns to deal with the world. Much like Mozart or Gauss. And yes, I am comparing Fischer as chessplayer to Mozart as composer and Gauss as mathematician.

But also as weirdo. Unfortunately chess has acquired a nerdy reputation, based largely on the overwhelming percentage of nerds among chessplayers, though those of us in the chess-instruction industry are laboring night and day to change that. And it must be admitted that Fischer is only an extreme manifestation of an intense, inwardly-directed, perfection-seeking personality that one often finds in chessplayers. Fischer famously complained during his match with Spassky about the noise from the cameras that were broadcasting the board position. Even when the cameras were in a separate room shooting through glass.

He blundered badly in the first game of the match, then disputed a ruling so vehemently that he refused to show up for the second game and was forfeited, thus starting the match 0-2. From that point he proceeded to demolish a strong, sharp, and resourceful sitting champion in Spassky, ending the match plus four at 12.5-8.5. Winning by a clear point (draws are worth half a point) is usually considered a strong showing in a tournament; two points is a large lead in a match. To beat the reigning champion by four is historic. Yet Spassky actually gained rating points, because Fischer’s rating was so much higher than the champion’s when the match began.

From an early age Fischer was famous for playing the same openings in all his games — 1. e4, or P-K4 for you old-style readers, as White, specializing in the Ruy Lopez; as Black, Najdorf Sicilian against king-pawn players and King’s Indian, or occasionally Gruenfeld, against queen pawns. He apparently believed that he understood the tree of possible moves and the consequences thereof so clearly that he knew certain paths all the way through the tree. (Try to build a tree of all the possible moves in one of your favorite openings and see how quickly the tree expands.) He also claimed to remember every game he’d ever seen.

In his match with Spassky he opened with the queen pawn for the first time in his career in a serious game. Spassky played his favorite defense. Fischer didn’t just beat it, he refuted it. Next cycle, he went back to the king pawn. I think it was that game, though I haven’t looked it up, that ended with Spassky so impressed that when he resigned he stood and began to applaud along with the audience. This was both a typically classy move by Boris and a smooth psychological ploy. Fischer was so rattled he got up and left the stage immediately.

On his way to beating Spassky, becoming the first and so far only American ever to win an official World Championship of chess, he got a congratulatory call from the President, who happened to be the old cold warrior Richard Nixon, happy for any American citizen beating a Soviet one. Fischer told him what he could do with it. He said he didn’t represent the US or anyone but himself. And that was right.

Bobby Fischer obviously had lots of psychological problems. His 1982 screed I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! convinced many that he’d completely lost it. You can understand how he might have become paranoid; his parents really were watched by Hoover’s FBI. And the Soviets were not above conniving to draw each other, saving all their energy for beating Fischer. He was paranoid, no doubt about it. But they really were after him, too. Poor guy.

At the time of Fischer-Spassky, grandmaster games usually had time controls of forty moves in two and a half hours. If the players hadn’t finished the game as the five-hour mark approached, the game would be adjourned. To equalize the overnight-analysis playing field, the player on the move would write down a move on a piece of paper but not make it on the board or show it to the opponent. The tournament director would seal that move. When the game was resumed, the TD would open the envelope and make the move written down. Then the opponent would be on the move and the game would proceed.

Spassky’s entourage, supplied by the Soviet chess machine, was impressive, with multiple masters and grandmasters, even including a couple of former World Champions, plus physical trainers and at least one psychologist (Fischer was particularly freaked by Krogius). If a game was adjourned, Spassky could analyze for an hour or two, then go to bed. When he got up, the assembled GMs would relate their findings as to the best plan and series of moves to employ upon resumption.

Fischer refused help. His entire support staff in Iceland consisted of William Lombardy, a priest as well as a grandmaster, mainly there to deal with the press. Lombardy later talked about analyzing with Fischer, saying that when they combined adjournment analyses Bobby would be moving the pieces so fast that Lombardy, a GM, could not follow the ideas.

After he won, he hit the big time: he continued his column in Boy’s Life, and was invited on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, proving to be the world’s worst interview. Carson had obviously boned up on the chess lingo and asked good questions, nearly all of which got monosyllabic answers. The only really memorable line to me was when Carson asked what, given Fischer’s intense concentration on the game, he did for fun. Bobby looked at him like he was crazy, and said, “I play chess.”

When he was 13 he played a game still known as the Game of the Century. He was famous for opening preparation; yet author and International Master Jeremy Silman ranks him among the top five endgame players so far (along with Lasker, Rubenstein, Capablanca, and Smyslov). An attacker who paradoxically enjoyed difficult defenses, he excelled at turning a small technical advantage into something tangible and then attackable and finally decisive.

Wikipedia says he did the Fifteen Puzzle in less than 25 seconds multiple times, including once for Johnny Carson. He invented a new kind of chess clock now in very wide circulation. He suggested a new way to play chess, now called FischerChess or Chess960, in which pieces are placed behind the pawns on the first rank randomly, thus requiring players to operate on positional understanding rather than memorized lines.

He held many unpleasant, and some despicable, opinions. I don’t recommend anything about his method of living to my students. Presumably music teachers don’t recommend a Mozartian life to their charges either. But the genius is undeniable in both cases. It’s too bad Fischer’s life was outwardly so unhappy. But I suspect he didn’t really give much of a damn about that. He was the best chessplayer who ever lived, and that’s what he cared about.